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Comment by mibbitier | Hacker News Reader

McDonalds are the biggest and most successful restaurant in the world. But I doubt any chef would describe their food as being fantastic.

When I want to eat a really nice meal with friends or family, I rule out McDonalds. Does this make me a "fanboi tool"?

Microsoft have a pretty long history of date related bugs in their software and products stretching back years. They do not seem to understand how leap years work.

Windows 98: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/150947.stm Zune: http://bit-player.org/2009/the-zune-bug Excel: "Excel 2000 incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year" Exchange 2007: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/04/microsoft_admits_to_...

etc etc

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The Excel one seems to have historical justification; that spolsky chap mentions it here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html. Basically, early Excel was being compatible with Lotus, which ignored 1900 being a leap year probably because of limited memory back then. Possibly MS should have fixed it before Excel 2000, but it's not a simple situation when being correct with leap years breaks compatibility with something else.

Yes, yes; this obviously makes Microsoft irrelevant roll eyes

Some of you need to be treated for Microsoft Derangement Syndrome.

It makes them as relevant as McDonalds is, when I'm considering where to go to get some good food.

As Linus himself said:"Microsoft hatred is a disease" http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_...

The do-ers get work done like Linus, while the talk-ers spend their time talking about how shitty other platforms are on Slashdot and HN and flag positive articles about Microsoft (so much so that http://winsupersite.com is hellbanned on HN).

Mc Donald's is not used by the 90% of the world. Microsoft clearly is a very successful company which builds great products. Just because their philosophy doesn't align with mine, or because I like Linux doesn't mean I have to diss them. Look at Kinect for example, It. Is. Revolutionary.

I'd guess McDonalds has a similar market share in food as Microsoft has in software... Do you disagree?

I bought a Kinect. I used it for a couple of days. It had a novelty value, but no staying power. I don't think I'm alone there.

In any event, my original point was that trusting your hosting to a company which had an outage due to not foreseeing a leap year, may not be a good decision.

Outages due to particularly hairy code related to redundancy and failover etc, I can forgive. But an outage caused by a leap year? No way.

You my friend are not aware of the radical things people are doing with kinect, just the other day I saw a demo of a quad copter with a kinect on top of it, and once you release it into a room, it will give you the whole 3D profile of the house without a human controlling it! If that does that not dazzle you, I am not sure what does.

And about the bug being a leap year bug is really a nonissue, a bug is a bug. An year ago, Github nuked their whole production database, because of a deployment glitch. We all create softwares with bugs, it's the response to that which matters. And, Microsoft does a stellar job at that.

Are you quite new to programming by any chance?

Dates are actually really, really hard to get right. They've been a problem for everyone for decades. When I started programming professionally about 10 years ago you'd be lucky if most programmers had even heard of UTC, let alone knew what it meant. Date bugs happen to everyone.

These days the higher order languages hide all the big problems from you. But when you get closer to the metal and you've not got someone else's library to help you it's very easy to make a mistake.

I've been programming for 25 years or so.

Hmm dates... It's almost as if you'd want to just count the number of seconds/ms since some point in time. Then you can do arithmetic easily, don't have to worry about calendars, leap years, etc... :/

Converting a date to a human readable form is hard. There is no way on earth that computers should be storing dates in human calendar readable forms. They should only ever be converted to that format for display purposes. That is the lesson MS don't ever seem to learn.

Converting a date to a human readable form is hard.

No, converting a date to human readable form is the easy part.

The hard part is converting the number of seconds from some epoch into a date.

The number of seconds from some reference point is not the same as a date.

So if I want add a year to a date and time I just have to add the number of seconds in a year which sounds ludicrously easy I agree. I want to know the exact date and time one year from February the 29th at 12:00 hours 2012. I want the answer to be consistent so what is the date and how many seconds do I add? I would also like to know the exact date and time one year from February the 28th at 12:00 hours 2011. I want the answer to be consistent so what is the date and how many seconds do I add?

Right. Like when you want some maintenance task to run once per month; you can just ignore the calendar and do simple arithmetic.

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